"You're supposed to signal them, is that it? How?"
He stared up at me, then nodded. "I was going to text them."
"Who are they?"
"Some guys. They just want to talk to you, that's all they want."
"Why do they want to talk to me, Zviadi?"
"I don't know."
I moved my right foot from his sternum to his groin and applied pressure. He brought his hands down to try and push my leg away, but he had no leverage, and he wasn't strong enough, and when he did it, I pushed down harder. His inhale was sharp and accompanied by a whimper. I put a finger to my lips to indicate that he wanted to keep it down.
"I called around!" He sounded like he was choking, either on his pain or his fear, both of which would've been fine by me. "For your girl, the one you were looking for! And they asked who wanted to know, and I told them, I told them this foreigner was asking! They said bring you here!"
"Why?"
He shook his head, wincing, cheeks inflating. I wondered how many of his dumplings were threatening to come up the direction they'd entered.
"Why?"
"I don't know! They just said bring you here!"
I looked up from him, at the building. No idea what was inside. Alena would've shat a brick if she knew I was considering walking in there alone.
"How many of them?" I asked Zviadi. "How many are coming?"
"Two, three, I don't know."
So double that, and the high estimate became six. There was no way I was going to take six guys, certainly not if they were who I thought they might be. Low estimate would be four, and even that was too many. Taking four by myself would require a minor miracle.
Nothing in what I had been taught, in what I had learned, either in my first career or my present one, told me that meeting these guys head-on was a good idea. Everything I knew told me that I should walk away, walk away now, and not look back.
Except there was a chance that whoever they were, they knew where Tiasa Lagidze was.
I drew my weapon and Zviadi flinched, hands flying to his face. I let his nuts go free from my boot.
"Get up," I told him. "You're coming with me."
CHAPTER
Six I wasn't a total idiot. I searched Zviadi first, took his cell phone and the knife he was carrying, a lean-looking Russian Army talon. Then I scouted the building, walking around its perimeter with Zviadi in front of me, my gun pointed at his back. He tried appealing to me twice. The first time I told him to shut up. The second time I hit him, and had to pull him to his feet again before we could resume.
He stopped protesting after that.
The building was, on the outside, everything I had feared it would be. Three portals total, covering the north and south sides, facing the water and the port, respectively. The south had the addition of a garage door. No windows, no ladders, no fire escapes. Some ten, maybe twelve meters tall, and damaged enough that I figured I could find the handholds if I had it in mind to try and scale it, which I didn't.
When we came around again to the south side, I told Zviadi to open the door. Both he and the door did as ordered without hesitating. I didn't take much reassurance from either.
I had to keep Zviadi close once we went inside, because it was dark and I didn't want him trying to escape. The fact that I didn't like him or his business made manhandling him easier. The fact that it was his own damn fault he was here with me in the first place only added to that. It took a few seconds of him fumbling in the darkness with the pressure of my pistol at his back before he found the light.
The bunker, it turned out, was a garage, or had been before port operations had moved further west and south. Now all that remained were the pieces that couldn't be relocated or the things that no one had wanted responsibility for. There was a hydraulic lift, left at three-quarters raise, the pit for work beneath. A dozen or so rusted-out fifty-gallon oil drums, pieces of metal, shavings, and rat feces.
I gave Zviadi back his phone, put my gun to his neck, and said, "Text them. Show me first."
He tapped out a simple message, the word NOW, and with a nod from me, sent it out. I took the phone back.
"Now what were you supposed to do?"
"I was supposed to leave." Either stupidity or gall made him put hope in his voice.
"Yeah," I said, imagining him running as fast as his mismatched legs could carry him, far enough to reach a phone or intercept his friends. "Yeah, Zviadi. That's not going to happen."
I dragged him over to the oil drums. Used motor oil filled most of them to the brim, fetid and thickened. One was mostly empty, and merely disgusting and rank. I told him to climb in.
He hesitated.
"You want to live through this," I told him, "you'll get in the fucking barrel. Otherwise, I've got no problem shooting you, and then putting you in the fucking barrel."
He didn't like it, and he was almost too fat to fit, but he got in the barrel. When I moved to place the lid back on it, he found his voice.
"Please," he said. "Don't."
I shook my head, tucked my pistol away long enough to take the top with both hands. "Don't move. Don't speak. You'll know when it's over."
I put the lid on his barrel, leaving enough room for air to leak in. He could push it off with no effort, but it was either that or kill him, and despite everything, I didn't want to do that. It's one thing to put down the shooter trying to light you up; that's survival, and when it comes down to survival, anything goes. But it's something else entirely to put a round in a man who's been rendered defenseless, who poses only a potential threat. Yes, Zviadi could make things difficult for me when his mates came through the door, but he could be smart and stay quiet, too. I had to give him the benefit of the doubt, no matter how vile I found him, no matter how dangerous it might be.
I had a good idea what Alena would've said about that, too.
Lid on, I made another quick survey of the space, looking for anything I'd missed, anything I could use. There was a rusted fuse box on the west wall, near the broken mounts where some heavy machine or another had once been secured, and I followed the conduits running off it with my eyes, tracking them. The trunk line dropped into the foundation, as was to be expected, but the two others running from the box ran up to the ceiling, then separated at a junction, sending out power to the rest of the building. The lights were high-hanging fluorescents, set in naked fixtures, half of them dead.
I checked the doors, first the southern one, from which we'd entered. It opened inward. I paused at it, listened, and then resolved myself to the fact that I wouldn't be hearing anything anyway through the concrete and steel. I cracked the door, looked out, and as I did so saw a set of headlights approaching, maybe fifty meters out, and if headlights could look familiar, these certainly did.
I shut the door and sprinted across the space, to the northern access. They'd arrived faster than I'd thought, probably waiting on Zviadi's call. Hell, we could've easily walked past them on the way here and I'd never have noticed, because I hadn't been certain at all what I was looking for. I checked the north door, and this one opened inward, too. I scanned the floor, found a rusted length of pipe that I thought would serve, stepped outside far enough to prop it quietly against the wall. I heard car doors slamming, the echo amplified by the concrete all around. The water's edge was only twenty, maybe twenty-five meters away, but it was all open ground between here and there, with no place to hide. I closed the door quietly, counted my steps back to the hydraulic lift, had almost reached it when the door to the south opened and they entered.
There were four of them, which was better than six, but not nearly as good as one, and they all had the swagger that comes from being predators feasting in an ocean of prey. Each was Caucasian, the same Central-to-Eastern European stamp on his face. Maybe Russian, or Ukrainian, or Georgian, or Albanian, or Romanian-I couldn't tell and doubted they'd answer if I asked. The weak fluorescent light grayed each of them out, made their pale skin paler, their dark hair darker.